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In recent years, the call for business actors to be part of collaborations addressing sustainable development has become more common. There is a consensus that no single sector alone can solve the environmental problems and poverty conditions challenging humanity. However, it is not clear if these cross-sector collaborations thrive when disasters can strike any time and when some actors are richer than others. Through a series of experiments involving threshold public goods games with stochastic shocks, this dissertation contains three related papers exploring different facets of the persistence of cooperation. The experiments were conducted in Sweden, the Philippines and South Africa, countries with varying disaster risk exposures and income structures. Cooperation in the face of disaster explores the effects of different types of uncertainties on cooperation, particularly when there is a risk for repeated disasters (i.e. losses resulting from inadequate cooperation). The results show that cooperation persists when we do not know when disasters may strike (i.e. timing), as well as when there are uncertainties on what is required to avoid the disaster (i.e. threshold) and which losses will be incurred (i.e. impact). Conditional cooperation and disaster uncertainty explores the mechanism behind the persistence of cooperation, as it investigates if conditionality continues to prevail in the face of disaster. The findings show that conditionality and free-riding attenuates while unconditional cooperation accelerates. Cooperating in an unequal and uncertain world explores what happens when inequality enters the picture. The findings reveal that cooperation remains the same when there is inequality and increases in the presence of uncertainty. The effect of uncertainty is stronger than inequality, with high unconditional cooperation and low freeriding. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2015</p>

In recent decades, a new direction of development economics has emerged, led by economists on a mission to improve the quality of life for citizens of developing countries through proven, cost-effective interventions. This micro-economic focus on development hinges on identifying barriers to growth and implementing targeted programs designed to alleviate these constraints. However, identifying constraints is far easier than measuring their magnitude, and designing effective measures to quantify these barriers remains a substantial challenge. Numerous microeconomic indicators of development are famously intractable and resist simple methods of accurate measurement. This dissertation tackles measurement challenges by quantifying three major development drivers: efficient investment, effective institutions, and public good provision. Using three case studies on business development and cooperation conducted in Russia and Kenya, I develop novel ways to quantify constraints and suggest methods to alleviate them. In the first chapter, I estimate marginal rates of return to capital for small retail firms, evaluate the causes of inefficiency and examine interventions that may aid growth. Next, I examine corruption as a barrier to small business growth and assess whether policy reform is capable of decreasing corrupt activity. Finally, I investigate the causes of heterogeneity in the financing of local public goods and experimentally document the conditions that improve communities’ ability to cooperate and coordinate on efficient Nash equilibria. In sum, I propose new ways of measuring marginal rates of return to capital, corruption incidence, and cooperation in public good provision; then leverage these measures to shed light on barriers to growth and to assess the effectiveness of possible interventions to enable development and achieve more efficient resource distribution.

Neoclassical economics assumes that consumers have stable, well-defined preferences. However, only 16% of subjects selected a chocolate bar when given a choice between it and a coffee cup, while 43% kept a chocolate bar previously given to them when offered a trade for a coffee cup. Instructional wording had no effect. These results support the hypothesis that people value losses more than gains. / Subjects were asked their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for twelve goods classified as either public or private, or as environmental or nonenvironmental. WTP tended to be lower for public goods when subjects previously ranked the personal importance or benefit they placed on the good. Importance was a weaker bias than benefit. Benefit appeared to induce free rider behaviour for public goods. The only environmental good affected by reading about sustainable development was one specifically mentioned in the article. Biases affecting WTP did not generally affect attributes correlated to WTP.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-115). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2006.

Diss. Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2010. / Härtill 5 uppsatser.

Punishment is the act of penalizing an individual as a response to a transgression. This thesis will deal with punishment in experimental game scenarios and in experimental criminal punishment scenarios, along with their different adaptations. The aim will be to provide an overview of both psychological and neurological underpinnings of punishment by reviewing existing literature. While punishment ought to deter transgressions and promote cooperative behavior, internal neural reward-related systems seem to be a driving factor of the desire to punish wrongdoings. Decisions on whether a transgressor is guilty and deserves punishment is mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex with an emphasis on the ventromedial parts. External influences affect the behavioral output and its underlying neural signatures of punishment. Social context such as peer pressure and in-group bias emphasize the importance of theory of mind related areas when conducting punishment.

Chapter 1.---Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) compete in mission statements. Opportunities for impact vary across issues---NGOs with broader missions expect to execute higher-impact projects but provide less precision to donors as to the types of projects that will be funded. I develop the first model in which competing NGOs strategically design their mission statements. Scope of the mission is a strategic complement. Competition leads NGOs to design inefficiently narrow missions while free entry leads to a socially excessive number of NGOs in operation. With low barriers to entry NGOs' missions overlap, each addressing issues that are not the preferred issue for any of its donors, and leading to greater expected impact at the periphery of its mission. Chapter 2.---In many settings firms rely on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to certify pro-social attributes embodied in their products. I develop a model of competition between NGOs in the provision of labeling services. Competition between a fixed number of NGOs features a race-to-the-top in labeling standards, but entry of NGOs offering new labels pushes standards down. Competition between NGOs often results in a socially-excessive number of labels, with each label excessively stringent. Compared to a setting in which firms can credibly communicate the social attributes of their products, labels demand greater pro-social behavior than desired by firms, although with proliferation of the number of labels this discrepancy disappears. In contrast to existing models, firms may engage in excessive corporate social responsibility when they rely on NGOs as certifying intermediaries. Chapter 3.---The intrinsic motivation of a firm's management for engaging in pro-social behavior is an important determinant of a firm's social conduct. I provide the first model in which firms run by morally-motivated managers engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a competitive setting. CSR induced by moral management crowds out a competitor's strategic CSR, increasing profitability and leading shareholders to strategically delegate moral managers. Firms run by moral managers can engage in a socially-excessive amount of CSR, and shareholders appoint such managers if and only if moral management is sufficiently effective at crowding out a competitor's strategic CSR.

Bureaucrats are hired to produce public goods. Yet, despite the distributive implications of this canonical rationale, bureaucrats are generally absent from theories of "who gets what." The three papers in this dissertation advance a role for bureaucrats in the distribution of public goods and services premised on their work in policy implementation. I provide new theory and evidence to answer three questions. The first paper asks the question: under what conditions do bureaucrats’ actions generate inequalities in the provision of public services? The second paper inquires: how does the design of bureaucratic oversight institutions influence a state's capacity to implement policy and citizen access to services? The third essay asks: how does the co-production of public goods by politicians and bureaucrats influence voters' ability to hold politicians to account? In the first paper, I study the conditions under which bureaucratic bias (discrimination) in the allocation of services generates inequality in access. I argue that citizens' principal mechanism of control over bureaucrats is to complain to a politician. When politicians respond to complaints by tightening oversight of bureaucrats, differences in citizens' access to complain induce bureaucrats to devote more effort to groups with the loudest voices. I test this theory using a national-scale factorial audit experiment of Colombia's two largest national social welfare programs to measure bureaucratic effort behaviorally. I find that bureaucrats provide less information about social welfare programs to poor citizens and internal migrants. Consistent with the theory, such bias manifests most strongly in places with greater inequalities in citizens' ability to access the state and on tasks where oversight from politicians is most likely. These results are unlikely to reflect taste-based discrimination or screening. This paper shows that inequality in access to public goods and services can emerge even when politicians' budget allocations to public goods are equitable. In the second paper, I examine the distributional consequences of the use of citizen complaints in bureaucratic oversight. I study the adoption and consequences of bureaucratic oversight institutions in the context of service provision. Specifically, I consider a politician's choice to use (or ignore) information generated by complaints when monitoring a bureaucrat. Complaints generate information that direct a politicians' remediation of bureaucratic decisions and may increase bureaucratic effort. However, when costs of complaint vary across the population, the use of this information generates inequality in the distribution of service outputs, improving the access of citizens that can complain while reducing the access of citizens that cannot. Further, relying on citizen information can build or erode a state's capacity to accurately implement public policies, depending on the distribution of these costs across the population. This paper introduces citizen complaint systems as an institution that shapes both policy implementation capacity and distributional outcomes in comparative perspective. In the final paper, I start from the observation that in many theories of electoral accountability, voters learn about an incumbent’s quality through the observation of public goods outcomes. However, politicians rely on bureaucracies to produce public goods. Across contexts, politicians work with bureaucracies of markedly different qualities. In this paper, I argue that accountability relations between voters and politicians yield different empirical implications at different levels of bureaucratic quality. I introduce a model of electoral accountability with a voter, a politician, and a bureaucrat. The model identifies observational equivalencies between (i.) the implications of pooling equilibria that emerge at high and low levels of bureaucratic quality (with informed, rational voters) and (ii.) the findings of existing studies that are interpreted to indicate a lack of accountability due to uninformed or irrational voters. I demonstrate the plausibility of the model by introducing and validating an original measure of bureaucratic quality in Brazilian municipalities. I use this measure to extend four studies on corruption and accountability. I conclude with implications for the comparative study of accountability across the world's democracies.